"Training a monkey would be easier"

It’s been a while since I’ve used the meta-post category. I think it’s a good opportunity to do so: exactly five years ago I typed “/./etc/init.d/blog start”, on this same blog. Quite a long time.

I’m really surprised I’ve managed to keep on writing more or less regularly for five years on this blog. There are now about 360 articles on this site, which gives an average of about one per week. That’s a nice metric, even if not very accurate. I spent almost a year without writing, while moving to a different country. Maybe I should start a blog about that too.

I just noticed a very silly “pattern” I usually fall into: since I like vim (perhaps a bit too much) to work with text, even free-form text like this blog post, most of the times I type a lot of text which then must be spell checked (so far I haven’t found a spell checking extension I like for vim). While spell checking I correct the original text in vim, and to do this I usually search for the mispel in Vim, thus typing the wrong spelling one more time. This has the side effect of reinforcing the bad spell instead of forcing me to type the correct spelling.

It’s amazing how easy it is to loose sight of a dancing bear (that sentence does make sense after viewing the video!). I wonder if that’s why I dislike Windows. Too many menus, whereas I have a single interface for pretty much anything with my CLI.

Yes, this is the post number 200 on this blog. Considering we are a month away of starting the fourth year, I guess that gives me quite a lousy periodicity, but I am still surprised I post somewhat regularly here after such a long time (hey, in programmer years that’s like a whole life!).

Since the beginning this blog has mutated from being my public notepad to being a place where I research new topics, or write about things that are generally interesting to me. I lost many readers for posting crazy metaprogramming stuff and for constantly babbling about Vim and Linux, but hey, I’m proud of if. Let’s see what the next 200 posts bring here.

Long time without updates. I guess I needed vacations from the blog. It was not the first time and it probably won’t be the last one I take, but I’m back now with another truckload of C++ ramblings and misc stuff. Like this one:

It’s been a long time since I used the metapost category. I’ve been taking a look at the queries received by Google for which this blogs shows up. Some of them are quite peculiar, some of them may give us an insight of what the search engine things of me. For example:

Query

Impressions

grumpy old man

2,000

grumpy

400

grumpy man

400

ugly old man

250

grouchy old man

110

grumpy old

35

old grumpy man

70

grumpy gnome

12

There was a long list of variations to these phrases, but I didn’t want such a long post. Anyway, if you thought that grumpy is all Google considers me to be, brace yourself for a surprise:

Query

Impressions

trained monkey

90

no life

90

funny troll

monkey using computer

tool monkey

congratulations monkey

monkey using tools

Basically, a computer using trained-troll monkey, with no life. Pretty accurate, some people may say.